The Cambridge School asserted that there was no real contradiction between imperialism and the Indian people and the central contradiction lay among the Indians themselves.
John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson argued that colonialism was the result of internal political weakness of the Asian and African regimes which then collaborated with the Europeans for setting up the colonial rules. Anil Seal, in his work The Emergence of Indian Nationalism (1968), contended that English education created a new middle class which clamoured for political representation. There was no conflict between the British and the Indians or between imperialist rule and the Indian people. The main contradiction was among the Indians, particularly among the educated elite, on the basis of caste, community and religion.
Seal contradicted with the Marxist historians. He was of the view that Indian nationalism was not the product of any class demand or as the consequence of any sharp changes in the structure of the economy. The emergence and growth of Indian nationalism can be comprehended by “A conceptual system based on elites, rather than on classes”. He argued that during the colonial era, there was intense competition among the elites for posts and positions offered by colonial regime. The rivalries took place ‘between caste and caste, community and community, not between class and class’. He believed there was horizontal mobilization around caste and community. The struggles which the Indian National Congress waged against the colonial rule were fake. The historians of this school later talked of vertical mobilisation around factions. Operational in the localities and controlled by local magnates, these factions had vertically organised structures of patron-client relationship. The struggles at local levels were seldom marked by the alliance of landlord with landlord, peasant with peasant, educated with educated, Muslim with Muslim and Brahmin with Brahmin. More frequently, Hindus worked with Muslims, Brahmins were hand in glove with non-Brahmins; and notables organized their dependents as supporters, commissioned professional men as spokesmen and turned government servants into aides”. These factions reached the towns and cities by employing the lawyers and politicians to serve their purposes. The localities became the main centres of power. These vertically organised factions became the most important factors in Indian politics. The Cambridge School still considered that the desire for collaboration with the colonial regime was the predominant motive behind politics among Indians, but the competition for getting seats in various representative institutions such as municipalities and provincial assemblies became the main focus. The region and the nation were secondary for the people.
Subaltern historians criticized the past Indian history-writing. Ranajit Guha, in the very first volume of theSubaltern Studies, argued that the historiography of Indian nationalism has for a long time been dominated by colonialist elitism and bourgeoise-nationalist elitism. Guha asserted all types of elitist histories did not include the politics of the people. He criticized the colonists, nationalists and Marxists. He claimed there were no attempts to understand the way in which the subaltern groups view the world. He criticised earlier historians for ignoring the popular initiative and accepting the official negative characterisation of the protests and the protesters.
Guha criticized the existing peasant and tribal histories for considering the peasant rebellions as “purely spontaneous and unpremediated affairs” and for ignoring the consciousness of the rebels themselves. He criticized all the accounts of rebellions, starting with the immediate official reports to the histories written by the left radicals. Guha said they failed to accept that there existed a parallel subaltern domain of politics which was not influenced by the elite politics and which possessed an independent, self-generating dynamics. Its roots, according to Guha, lay in pre-colonial popular social and political structures. He argued that the people’s politics differed from the elite politics.
The Subaltern historians were critical of the Congress nationalism and its embodiment in the Indian state. They rejected the idea that popular mobilisation was the outcome of either economic conditions or initiatives from the top. They claimed to have found a popular autonomous domain as against the elite domain of politics. This subaltern domain was defined by perpetual resistance and rebellion against the elite. The domain clubbed together a variety of heterogeneous groups such as tribes, peasantry, proletariat and the middle classes.
According to Gyanendra Pandey, the peasant movement in Awadh started before and independently of the non-cooperation movement. Peasants’ understanding of the local power structure and its alliance with colonial power was more advanced than that of the Congress leaders. In Stephen Henningham’s account of the ‘Quit India in Bihar and the Eastern United Provinces’, the elite and the subaltern domains were clearly differentiated. There were two movements – an elite uprising started by the high caste rich peasants and small landlords who led the Congress and a subaltern rebellion led by the poor, low caste people of the region. Shahid Amin argued that the popular perception and actions were completely different from the Congress leaders’ perception of Gandhi. He said the Mahatma’s messages were spread widely through “rumours”, but there was an entire philosophy of economy and politics behind it. David Hardiman also argued there was an independent politics of the subaltern against the elites.
Sumit Sarkar also claimed that the non-cooperation movement in Bengal presented a picture of masses outstripping leaders and the popular initiative eventually alarmed leaders into calling for a stop. The subaltern groups formed a relatively autonomous political domain with specific features and collective mentalities. The subaltern world was different from the domain of the elite politicians. The subalternist historians asserted that both colonialists and the bourgeois nationalists failed to establish their hegemony over the subalterns. Besides, the Indian bourgeoisie failed to speak for the nation, and the Congress nationalism and elite restrained popular radicalism.
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